Featured Poet Philip Schultz
Philip Schultz is the author of several collections of poetry, including Failure, winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. His other collections include Luxury, The Wherewithal: A Novel in Verse, The God of Loneliness: New and Selected Poems, Living in the Past, and The Holy Worm of Praise. He is also the author of My Dyslexia and Comforts of the Abyss. His work has been published in The New Yorker, Partisan Review, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Slate, and other magazines. He is the recipient of a Fullbright Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry.
Opening Voice Faith Vicinanza
Ms. Vicinanza was appointed the Poet Laureate of Southbury in October, 2022 for a three-year term to serve as an advocate for the importance of poetry in the community and in the world.
Ms. Vicinanza has served as a Master Teaching Artist in Poetry for the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, as editor for several literary magazines, and as the founder and executive director of the Connecticut Poetry Festival (1997, 2001, 2003).
She is the author of four collections of poetry and is currently working on several new collections and a memoir.
A member of two national slam poetry teams, Ms. Vicinanza competed in National Slam Championships in 1994 and 1996. She was a member of the U.S. Slam Team that competed in Sweden in 1997, as well as the executive director of the 1997 National Poetry Slam Championships held in Middletown, Connecticut, the largest poetry event in the state’s history.
Ms. Vicinanza has been featured in venues from Stockholm, Sweden to San Francisco, has been a poet laureate nominee for Connecticut and is the recipient of the 2003 Connecticut Commission on the Arts Advocates for the Arts Award.